Yes, I like this concept of "gore". Had similar experience while playing brytenwalda when I first time "decapitate" an enemy. I was really troubled seing a headless body drop dead in front of me, emotionally scarred by that gaming experience since I didn't expect something like that to happen. Shows what a squemish person I am in real life.
Just take an old system like in X-Com Apocalypse where it uses concept like aim shot, snap shot and burst shot along with options to aim at certain part of the body/limbs. That way you'll have different attack speed/accuracy along with effects of such attack. Not just effect of strikes where a good well aimed strike could tear off limbs in a spray of blood and gore, you could even create different attack animation for it.
For example, aim strike have a slow more composed/refined movement while burst strike shows a flailing and wild kind of slashing (samurai anime is a good source for example). So when you fight a powerful enemy or surrounded you could focus on:
1. cutting their sword arm for an easier fight
2. decapitate or incapacitate enemies to reduce their numbers
3. hamstring them to prevent their escape (good for quest like capturing scouts or abduction)
When we have range weapons, there will be more interesting way to fight. I used to play X-Com apocalypse by sending solo unit on missions successfully. Giving many fighting options really makes it interesting because it will give you an opportunity to implement creative non-conventional battle solutions---like throwing grenades back at enemies, ambush them at corners, shoot their arm so they incapable to use two handed heavy weapons, smoke grenade to hide from rocket launchers along with stun grenade traps to steal their rockets, making booby trap with a pile of mines, rockets and genades with proximity mines for a spectacular explotion that causes the whole building to collapse, timing the explotion with you teleporter to escape death, causing enemy like the Cult of Sirius to become panicked and run mad...those were the good old days...
Hey now that I think of it, there are times when the enemy like dust bandits would run away in fear...not sure how Chris implement these systems but I do hope there's way where you could become panicked, scared, surrender or even goes berserk and fight to the death with a beastly strength....could be useful in critical situations like ingesting potion or getting drunk to get berserk and fight better...
Especially in large battles, you could get nice views of soldier with their own personal emotion, some would run in fear, others fight bravely and a few would be overcome by uncontrollable bloodlust (the player would loose control of this squad member and it will fight until all enemies are defeated)